“Then tell me which of them it is!” “Never!” “Think that I can no longer see my children or feel them round me, without having my heart burdened with this doubt.  Tell me which of them it is, and I swear that I will forgive you, and treat it like the others.”  “I have not the right to.”  “You do not see that I can no longer endure this life, this thought which is wearing me out, or this question which I am constantly asking myself, this question which tortures me each time I look at them.  It is driving me mad.”

“Then you have suffered a great deal?” she said.

“Terribly.  Should I, without that, have accepted the horror of living by your side, and the still greater horror of feeling and knowing that there is one among them whom I cannot recognize, and who prevents me from loving the others.”  She repeated:  “Then you have really suffered very much?” And he replied in a constrained and sorrowful voice: 

“Yes, for do I not tell you every day that it is intolerable torture for me?  Should I have remained in that house, near you and them, if I did not love them?  Oh!  You have behaved abominably towards me.  All the affection of my heart I have bestowed upon my children, and that you know.  I am for them a father of the olden time, as I was for you a husband of one of the families of old, for by instinct I have remained a natural man, a man of former days.  Yes, I will confess it, you have made me terribly jealous, because you are a woman of another race, of another soul, with other requirements.  Oh!  I shall never forget the things that you told me, but from that day, I troubled myself no more about you.  I did not kill you, because then I should have had no means on earth of ever discovering which of our ... of your children is not mine.  I have waited, but I have suffered more than you would believe, for I can no longer venture to love them, except, perhaps, the two eldest; I no longer venture to look at them, to call them to me, to kiss them; I cannot take them onto my knee without asking myself:  ’Can it be this one?’ I have been correct in my behavior towards you for six years, and even kind and complaisant; tell me the truth, and I swear that I will do nothing unkind.”

He thought, in spite of the darkness of the carriage, that he could perceive that she was moved, and feeling certain that she was going to speak at last, he said:  “I beg you, I beseech you to tell me....”  “I have been more guilty than you think, perhaps,” she replied; “but I could no longer endure that life of continual pregnancy, and I had only one means of driving you from my bed.  I lied before God, and I lied, with my hand raised to my children’s head, for I have never wronged you.”

He seized her arm in the darkness, and squeezing it as he had done on that terrible day of their drive in the Bois de Boulogne, he stammered:  “Is that true?” “It is true.”  But he, in terrible grief, said with a groan:  “I shall have fresh doubts that will never end!  When did you lie, the last time or now?  How am I to believe you at present?  How can one believe a woman after that?  I shall never again know what I am to think.  I would rather you had said to me:  ‘It is Jacques, or, it is Jeanne.’”